New technologies for teaching and education

The purpose of new technologies developed by Calerga is to let our
clients focus on what's essential to them, taking care of accessory
technical issues. This is especially important for teaching where
allocated study time is limited.

Since its creation, Calerga has developed close and lasting
collaborations with renowned universities. With Sysquake, Calerga has
pioneered interactive graphics. To put them in the hands of students
in the simplest and most effective ways, Calerga has utilized
different technologies, most of them already validated by thousands
of students.

Sysquake Application Builder

Creation of royalty-free stand-alone applications. Sysquake
Application Builder is bundled with Sysquake Pro. Applications it
creates benefit from most capabilities of Sysquake, starting with
interactive graphics. They can be distributed on CD or on Internet
or intranet.

Sysquake Remote

HTTP server extension in a CGI or an Apache HTTPD module.
Close to PHP in its functioning principle, but with the power of
Sysquake. Graphics can be integrated in web pages very easily, with
limited support for interactivity.

AJAX and websockets

To get the same “live” interactivity of Sysquake in a
browser, several paths have been explored, following the adoption
of new standards in web browsers. Sysquake can be split into two
parts: the server handles computation and prepares the graphics,
while the client, written in JavaScript in a web page, handles the
display and the mouse. For communication, first attempts were based
on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a series of HTTP
requests) with adequate performance on fast intranets. Websockets
allow much better performance by keeping a single connection open
and avoiding reconnection latency.

Sysquake in JavaScript

To avoid completely the slowness caused by internet
communication, the next logical step is to put the whole program in
the browser. A total rewrite of Sysquake in JavaScript began in
2013. The result can be used in several ways: with a
command-line prompt which gives to the student the complete control
on the sequence of computation steps she wants to carry out, in
interactive graphics based on the same “SQ files” (Sysquake
programs) as in the standard Sysquake itself, or in EPUB3 e-books.

MOOCS and future learning infrastructures present new
challenges. We'll be glad to address them with you. For instance,
we've acquired a thorough knowledge of the LTI standard, an extension
architecture supported by many learning platforms. We've developed
and deployed a solution which integrates applications written with
Sysquake in JavaScript and the remote lab experiments of our
customer.